When contacting support we may on occasion ask you to provide the ‘full steps to replicate the problem or error’ and this blog post is intended to explain what we mean and why it is needed. We may also phrase this in different ways such as ‘steps to repeat’, ‘how do I see the error’ and ‘can you provide more info please’.
Why?
When investigating any reported problem we will typically look at monitoring, logging and graphing first. Often this will be sufficient for us to identify then resolve the issue however quite often an error in a log file will only log the first issue/failure or may not directly relate to the problem you see and we will ask for the steps to replicate.
By you providing us with full steps to replicate the problem we can ensure that your issue is properly investigated and resolved.
What?
We want as much information as possible! You can literally not provide us with too much information though what information is relevant depends on the type of problem so we have provided an example below.
BAD:
"I get an error in my WordPress when I edit posts"
AWESOME:
"I get an error in my WordPress when I edit posts, steps to replicate are below:
- Visit http://my.domain.com/wp-admin/ (web username: guest, password: guest)
- Go-to Posts
- Find the post titled “doesnt work” on page 3.
- Click Edit
- Enter the text attached into the post body
- Click submit
- I then see an “Error 403″ as in the attached screenshot and it doesn’t save the post!”
We are passionate about providing an outstanding level of support and we hope this post helps you to make the most efficient use of our services.
Recording Steps to Replicate using PSR.exe
Possibly the easiest means to providing the perfect steps to replicate is using PSR.exe which is packaged with Windows 7 & onward.
To use, simply do the following:
- Click the start button and in the search box type PSR and hit enter. You will be presented what looks like the Windows sound recorder.
- Click the Start Record button, click around your website or email client to replicate your issue in 25 clicks or less (this can be increased).
- Once finished, click Stop Record; You will be prompted to save a .ZIP file containing your steps.
That’s it! Once finished simply attach the zip file to a Support Ticket and one of our engineers can take a detailed look into your problem for you.
If you have any other tips, ticks or a comment then please let us know below.
Classification: Public
Last saved: 2019/11/27 at 16:03 by Jamie